Showtime Examines Shoah Diva Doctor

In Showtime's "Out of the Ashes," a Holocaust survivor steps
off a boat at New York Harbor, imperiously hands her battered suitcase to her
American niece and embarks on a shoe shopping spree.

The TV movie is the story of Dr. Gisella Perl (Christine Lahti),
the Hungarian gynecologist who saved 1,000 women by performing secret abortions
in Auschwitz. "She was also a bit of a diva," Lahti said.

The actress ("Chicago Hope," "The Heidi Chronicles") said
she was drawn to the film because of its unconventional depiction of a survivor
as less than heroic. "Gisella had a very mixed reputation," the tall, imposing Lahti
said in the cavernous living room of her Brentwood home on a recent morning.
"In videotaped testimonials, some eyewitnesses said she was the bravest person
they had ever seen, risking her life every time she performed abortions with
her bare hands on the barracks floor. Others said she was elitist, demanding
bread as payment for medical services. She even had a 'maid' in the barracks, a
patient who made up her cot and sewed holes in her doctor's coat."

"Ashes" also depicts how Perl volunteered, albeit under
duress, to assist the notorious Dr. Mengele, for which she was initially barred
from practicing medicine in the United States.

As such, it's the latest in a small but growing body of
films, including Tim Blake Nelson's "The Grey Zone," that presents Holocaust
victims not as martyrs but as complex human beings forced to make excruciating,
even abhorrent choices in order to survive. The trend has troubled observers
such as Aaron Breitbart, senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who
worries that "viewers don't have enough knowledge and sophistication about the
Holocaust to absorb the nuances."

Lahti, however, believes more traditional depictions in
high-profile films such as "Schindler's List" have prepared viewers for
characters like Perl. "It was ultimately her need to survive that touched me,"
the actress said. "It was the things she did that weren't so heroic but
completely human."

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Lahti, who grew up Lutheran, said her Holocaust education
began when she met her Jewish husband of 19 years, director Thomas Schlamme
("The West Wing"), whose parents fled Berlin just before Kristallnacht. On an
early outing, the couple sat through the nine-hour Claude Landzmann
documentary, "Shoah." "I was horrified," Lahti said. Later, her refugee
father-in-law described enlisting in the U.S. Army and helping to liberate
concentration camps.

The actress went on to read books and watch films on the
Holocaust, but said she encountered few from a woman's point of view. Which is
why she was riveted by a 1980s New York Times article on Perl: "I put it in a
drawer, and 15 years later I got the call from Jerry Offsay at Showtime," she
said. "I couldn't believe the coincidence."

Lahti, 51, was a logical choice for the role. In addition to
directing an Oscar-nominated 1994 short film and a well-received first feature,
"My First Mister," starring Leelee Sobieski, she's carved a niche portraying
complicated, embattled women. Lahti received an Oscar nomination for playing a
scrappy factory worker in 1984's "Swing Shift" and an Emmy as power-hungry Dr.
Kate Austin on CBS' "Chicago Hope."

To portray Perl, Lahti studied numerous films and books,
including Perl's autobiography, "I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz;" she also interviewed
survivors and perused videotaped testimonials at Steven Spielberg's Survivors
of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The first day on the set in Vilnius, Lithuania, Lahti turned
to director Joseph Sargent and said, "This is much harder than I thought it
would be." After, she said, "I had anxiety attacks and insomnia, and I warned
Joe that I might need to stop shooting at some point and call my husband."

Sargent told The Journal he was "waiting for Christine to
break down but that never happened. Instead, she translated what was going on
inside her into an incredibly subtle, powerful performance. That subtlety
allowed us to examine the morally complex areas that haven't been explored so
much in Holocaust films."

While Perl may have been a diva, Lahti nevertheless admires
her. "As much guilt as she had and as much loss as she endured, she was able to
contribute so much," she said. "But she did have a sense of privilege, even in
hell."

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